Both huge untapped markets. Unbable especially with providing translation services for customer support to allow earlier entry into European and Asian markets for american startups.
Abacus because expenses are a real pain and make employees unhappy.
If I could short algolia I would. Just seems to be generating buzz as it sounds developer cool, but is not a practical solution. Perhaps I misunderstand it.
1. Keeping all your data in constant sync with a third party 2. You'd obviously have to do a sanity check now and then, even more code 3. Search isn't that important on most sites, 2.5% of visitors use ours 4. Trusting what is some of your most business critical information to a third party 5. Extra point of failure
We have an autocomplete (with all the 'reinvented' features you list), but it sorely needs some TLC to handle mis-spellings. I like the idea of that kind of easy to use auto-complete.
But on my server.
As I say, perhaps I'm not the target market.